A large group of UConn students will once again forgo the traditional spring break of the beach and parties next week and take part in an alternative trip that focuses on service through the the University’s Office of Community Outreach.
Eight different trips by a total of more than 200 students and 14 staff members will take place during spring break 2018, March 10-18, to locations including New York; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma, Cosby, Tennessee; and Mullins, West Virginia.
Each trip also has student leaders who have experience of previous alternative break trips.
“The trips are very productive, as you get to immerse yourself in a community for an entire week and find out what the real needs are,” says Megan Boyer ’18 (CLAS), a molecular and cell biology/psychology major from Manchester, Connecticut. Boyer is taking her third alternative spring break this year; she traveled first to Atlanta, and then to Philadelphia as a trip leader, and this year is going to Utah to work on environmental conservation.
“It’s very meaningful to do this as a college student,” she says. “People think college students don’t care in general, but this is a chance to show that they do.”
UConn has …

UConn senior Jiazhen Huang is not unlike a lot of his classmates in many ways. He’s made a lot of great friends in Storrs, plays intramural sports and works out a few times a week, and is a very serious student. His first exposure to UConn was also a common one – championship basketball.
The difference is that Huang heard about the Huskies from a world away – in his native Shanghai, China.
“I loved following American college sports when I was growing up, and UConn was winning a lot of championships when I was looking at schools,” says Huang, known to his friends on campus as Wong or Johnson.
Huang went to UConn Stamford his first year, and then enrolled at the main campus in Storrs. He attended a bilingual high school in China, where English was spoken during many of the classes. His family owns a factory that manufactures shoes and employs approximately 150 people.
Huang played basketball and soccer growing up and has decided that he would like to make a career out of sports. He is pursuing an individualized major in sport promotion, and minors in digital marketing.
“A student has to be motivated to have an individualized major,” says Monica …

A snowflake is the nastiest well-behaved curve we can think of. And that’s a useful thing, argues UConn mathematician Vyron Vellis.
The snowy weather has snowflakes on our minds, though perhaps not the mathematical kind. Mathematical functions called Rohde snowflakes are different than your typical wintry precipitation. They’re made of triangles instead of ice, and they don’t melt in spring. But they can look very similar.
The snowflake in the line drawing is one of the most famous in mathematics. It’s called a von Koch snowflake, and it’s a form of mathematical curve known as a fractal curve. To make it, you draw an equilateral triangle. Then you pop out smaller equilateral triangles on each of the original’s three sides. Then you pop out more triangles on those triangles’ side, and so on ad infinitum. This makes an infinitely long shape that looks the same at any scale, no matter how far you zoom in. It always looks like a Star of David, with an infinite array of smaller stars growing out of every side.
Not all snowflakes are so symmetrical. Snowflakes can pop out different shaped triangles on different sides, or leave one side unmolested at every stage, but they are always …

In Scientific Reports today, UConn researchers report a novel approach to reconstructing ancient climates using analyses of organic compounds in sediments and soils.
This method was developed by former UConn postdoctoral scientist Yvette Eley (now in the Department of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, U.K.) and assistant professor Michael Hren in the UConn Center for Integrative Geosciences. Their new approach makes use of organic compounds found in the waxy, lipid-rich cuticle of plants. These waxy surfaces are critical to plant survival, as they minimize water loss and provide protection from factors such as UV radiation.
The distribution of organic compounds in leaf waxes records information about their growing environment. For instance, when confronted with stressful conditions such as shortage of water, plants can respond by changing the distribution of organic compounds in their leaf wax to combat water loss and improve their chances of survival. Various environmental parameters can therefore result in plants with different distributions of lipids, and these profiles can reveal a lot about the climate those plants were growing in.
Once incorporated into the soil, these organic compounds can be preserved over tens to hundreds of millions of years, offering the potential to quantify changes …

UConn’s student-athletes are often lauded for their on-field or on-court achievements, but there’s an equally important – often unseen – dimension to the student-athlete. UConn Today’s Student-Athlete Strong series highlights the academic prowess of selected high-achieving student-athletes and provides an inside look at their lives beyond their sport.
Julie Hu ’19 (CLAS)
Hometown and high school: Cary, North Carolina; Panther Creek High School
Sport: Women’s Swimming
Area of study: Mathematics-Actuarial Science-Finance, with a minor in Statistics
Anticipated graduation: May 2019
What attracted you to the Actuarial Science program at UConn?
In the actuarial community, UConn is known to have one of the strongest actuarial programs in the nation, as it is recognized by actuarial societies. Along with a strong course selection, it has well respected professors all at the top of their respective fields and great advisors with years of on the job experience.
How did you pick your major?
I have always loved math, however I did not want to study engineering, so I searched for another math-heavy major. My high school calculus teacher introduced me to the actuarial field, and the more exposure I got to it, the more interested I was. The finance major is a great addition, and is something I decided after starting school. It is closely related to …

Faculty, staff, and students from 14 departments and institutes across the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and from the Storrs, Hartford, Stamford, and Waterbury campuses gathered on Friday for a research poster session devoted to themes of diversity.
Sponsored by the CLAS Faculty Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, “Looking Within: A CLAS Faculty Poster Session Featuring Research on Diversity and Inclusion-Related Matters” highlighted timely topics such as social flexibility in bilinguals, reducing social microaggressions, political movements born in black high schools, and how mindfulness can reduce prejudice.
But perhaps just as important, the themes were close to many hearts, according to CLAS Associate Dean of Social Sciences and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Cyrus “Ernie” Zirakzadeh.
“This is work that is personally important to so many of these researchers,” said Zirakzadeh. “I am truly inspired by my colleagues.”
Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, assistant professor of psychological sciences, presented on how being brought up bilingual affects social behavior. Although psychologists know that bilingualism has cognitive benefits, Ramirez-Esparza showed that bilinguals are also on the whole more comfortable switching from one social situation to another, and that they are more likely to seek social interactions.
“We know that interacting with others keeps you happy and healthy, so this …

UConn researchers recently documented in Nature Scientific Reports a gory and fascinating relationship between periodical cicadas and a fungus that infects them, hijacks their behavior, and causes a scene straight out of a zombie movie.
“It’s a fun story for us, not for the cicadas,” says UConn ecology and evolutionary biology researcher and adjunct faculty member John Cooley.
Though researchers have known about the fungus for around 100 years, Cooley and his colleagues David Marshall, a postdoc, and lab technician Kathy Hill have published new findings about the infection.
The story starts with the cicadas’ emergence, when around 2 to 5 percent are infected with spores of a fungus called Massospora cicadina. Though the fungus infects both male and female cicadas, the researchers discovered that early in the emergence, the infection – at this point called a Stage I infection – causes curious behavioral changes in males where, in addition to their normal mating behaviors, they will exhibit wing flicking that is typically seen only in female cicadas.
The infected male cicadas put on a ruse, much like the Sirens of Greek myths; they flick their wings like a female, and lure in healthy unsuspecting males, who get close enough to be exposed to …

Former University of Connecticut women’s track and field standout Phylicia George '10 (CLAS) is set to make her winter Olympic debut at PyeongChang 2018. George will become a dual season Olympian as a bobsledder for Team Canada, after competing for her home country as a track and field athlete at London 2012 and Rio 2016.
George becomes the second UConn graduate to compete in the Winter Olympics, following Bethany Hart, also a former women’s track standout, who was named to the U.S. National Women’s Bobsled team and competed in Torino in 2006.
George will compete alongside two-time Olympic champion Kallie Humphries in the women’s bobsled. Bobsleigh will be held at the Olympic Sliding Centre, with competition running from Feb. 18-21, 24-25 (Days 9-12, 15-16).
George made her Olympic debut in 2012 when she competed at the London Games for Team Canada in the 100m hurdles. At the 2012 Canadian Championships, George won the 100m dash and finished second in the 100m hurdles, qualifying her for two events at the summer games. George elected to opt out of the dash to focus on her main event, the 100m hurdles. The decision paid off, as she advanced to the finals, placing fifth with a personal …

The Instructor
Cathy Schlund-Vials spent eight years living in England, part of growing up as the adopted daughter of a career U.S. Air Force chief master sergeant who rotated to military bases at home (Florida, Georgia, and Texas) and abroad. Considering herself “a bit of an Anglophile” when she decided to pursue a doctoral degree at UMass Amherst, Schlund-Vials planned to focus on British literature in her studies.
After enrolling in a class titled “History and Memory,” an ethnic American literature course that was taught by the noted literary critic Joseph Skerrett, she found herself moving down a different path. “It was the first time I had a professor of color who taught literature by people of color,” says Schlund-Vials, who was born in Thailand following the liaison of her Cambodian mother and American father and was later adopted, with her twin brother, by a mixed-race couple, an American of German-Scots-Irish heritage and his Japanese wife. “I finally saw myself in the literature.”
A professor of English, Schlund-Vials has served since 2010 as director of UConn’s Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and also is president of the National Association for Asian American Studies. “I try to make the experience of Asian American …

Why did you choose to come to UConn?
I applied and got into the Special Program in Law. I was like, “I’m in law school!” And my mother’s like, “Rein it in, Elizabeth, rein it in.” It was really the Special Program in Law and the Honors Program that made UConn so attractive. I think they’re some of the best assets this university has, but of course I’m very biased.
Tell us about interning in Washington, D.C., last summer with the Brady Campaign.
I was so lucky to have been able to work with them. The Brady Campaign is one of the oldest gun violence prevention organizations in the country and is the leader in gun violence prevention litigation. One of its big recent cases was the Florida gag rule, which prevented doctors from asking patients about guns in their homes. It’s a child safety issue. The Brady Campaign and others challenged the law, and the courts overturned the gag rule. They ruled that doctors have a right to ask. It’s constitutionally protected speech. That’s something I never would have thought of, but the Brady Campaign went after it. It’s incredible how much you can do through the courts.
Have you always been interested …

About CLAS

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is the academic core of learning and research at UConn. We are committed to the full spectrum of academics across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We give students a liberal arts and sciences education that empowers them with broad knowledge, transferable skills, and an ability to think critically about important issues across a variety of disciplines.